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How Reggaetón Became the World's Genre

How Reggaetón Became the World's Genre

Public Opinion
August 02, 2024

A Note from Jack

“Despacito” is the second most viewed video on YouTube. 8.5 billion views and counting in 7 years – and I’m not talking about the Justin Bieber version. Bad Bunny has more Billion-stream songs on Spotify than Taylor Swift. Whenever we feature a Latin artist on Track Star, I’m shocked at how many Instagram followers they have. There’s no question that Latin music, with reggaetón leading the way, is some of the most popular music in the world.

This week, we’re doing a deep dive into the history of reggaetón, led by our friend Matthew Ismael Ruiz. Matthew has bylines in all your favorite music publications and curates playlists for Apple Music. He also ran up the scoreboard on his Track Star appearance. If you’re interested in what you read here be sure to check out the reggaetón playlist down below. Maybe we need to film this show in Latin America? Necesito practicar mi español…

Where does Reggaetón come from?

By Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Reggaetón is the beat heard around the world, the sound of the Caribbean underground that’s become intertwined with mainstream pop music. A tropical fusion of dancehall, reggae, and hip-hop en Español, the genre has become some of the most popular dance music in the world. The global dominance of artists like J Balvin and Bad Bunny has helped reimagine the paradigm of “crossover” success—it’s no longer the Spanish-speaking artists that need to drop an English-language record to reach the other market, but the other way around. But the genre’s humble origins are rooted in migration, the diaspora, and the cultural exchange it engenders.

Reggaetón’s roots stretch across the Caribbean sea. Its foundation was laid in the late 1980s in the Jamaican expat communities in Panama, where migrant workers settled to work on the massive ongoing engineering project that is the Panama Canal. The inspiration was simple: reggae and dancehall music with Spanish lyrics. Artists like El General (“Tu Pum Pum") and Nando Boom ("Ellos Benia (Dem Bow)") cut Spanish-language versions of popular reggae and dancehall riddims, blending the sounds of their home island with the native language of their adopted homeland.

That fusion would further evolve in early 1990s Puerto Rico, where DJs and MCs would chop up, blend, and mix those riddims with the hip-hop sounds that made their way back to the island from Boricua communities in New York. DJ Negro, the rap en Español pioneer who helped launch Vico C’s career, was fresh off getting fired from his old gig at another club when he assembled a crew of DJs, producers, and rappers to cut records and perform them at his new club the Noise.

His friend DJ Playero—who brought a 16-year-old Daddy Yankee to perform at the Noise in 1992—started making mixtapes with many of the artists who were performing at his club, which exploded in popularity. The crowds went nuts for tracks cut with the now-iconic “Dem Bow” riddim—popularized by Shabba Ranks’ 1990 hit “Dem Bow”—so they gave them more. Soon enough, the signature “boom taka-ta/boom taka-taka” riddim, often pulled from Dennis “The Menace” Thompson’s “Pounder,” had come to define this new sound now known as reggaetón. By the time the club closed, legends such as Tego Calderon, Ivy Queen, Nicky Jam, and Wisin y Yandel had graced its stage.

The music was popular throughout the 90s, but its explicit lyrics and associations with Puerto Rico’s socio-economic underclass drew ire from the establishment, to the point that the music was banned and made illegal to play in public or sell in stores. Yet by the end of the decade, the fancier clubs started playing the music to lure back customers, major labels swooped in offering distribution, and the genre was ready to break out of the underground. The watershed moment was the release of Daddy Yankee’s 2004 album Barrio Fino, and its smash hit single “Gasolina,” a raucous reggaetón that introduced millions to the sound for the first time. Its popularity spread throughout Latin America, especially in Colombia, where it would inspire a new generation of reggaetoneros obsessed with the infectious beat.

By the 2010s, the dembow riddim and reggaetón were ubiquitous, to where a relatively milquetoast Puerto Rican pop star like Luis Fonsi could recruit Daddy Yankee to make a reggaetóncito like “Despacito” and ride it to the top of the charts. And when it sparked a trend of English-language stars contributing verses—in Spanish—to leverage the Latin American audience (Justin Bieber on “Despacito,” Beyoncé on J Balvin’s “Mi Gente,” Drake on Bad Bunny’s “Mia”), it became clear that the genre had become part of the mainstream.